9. Bloody Sunday¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) as a decisive rupture in the Northern Irish conflict, arguing that the British army’s killing of thirteen unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Derry exposed the impossibility of pacifism under colonial conditions and opened a strategic vacuum that the Provisional IRA would fill. The text contends that British imperialism initially attempted cosmetic reform—replacing the B-Specials with the Ulster Defence Regiment—but could not escape the fundamental truth that Six-County rule required coercive government as “the last corner of colonial rule in Ireland.” The massacre produced a massive popular response: 70,000 marched in Newry, a general strike shut Dublin on the day of the funerals, a three-day strike swept Derry and other northern towns, and Protestant workers participated alongside Catholics, notably at Dupont and among Post Office engineers. Yet the pacifist civil rights leadership collapsed, and the Provisionals exploited the hunger for revenge, growing rapidly “at the expense of everyone else.”
The chapter delivers a sustained polemic against Provisional IRA strategy, dismissing as false the assumption that Britain would tire of mayhem and withdraw. “Decades later we are still waiting,” it notes, arguing that bombing pushed Protestants into Orange reaction, split the working class, and strengthened the British state—achieving “precisely the opposite of what was intended.” The Sunningdale Agreement of 1974 is presented as a template for later settlements like the Good Friday Agreement: a powerless Council of Ireland and power-sharing executive that collapsed when the Ulster Workers’ Council strike, backed by Loyalist paramilitary intimidation and control of electricity generation, forced Unionist ministers to resign. The chapter observes that this reactionary strike nonetheless demonstrated “the colossal power of the working class” to paralyse the system.
The text then turns to Seamus Costello as the lost alternative. A veteran republican who recognised that “heroism and self-sacrifice were not enough,” Costello argued for linking the national question to class struggle, using parliament without illusions, and building a party involved in trade union work, housing, fisheries, and women’s emancipation. Expelled by the Stalinist Official IRA leadership after its 1972 ceasefire, he founded the Irish Republican Socialist Party and Irish National Liberation Army in 1974. His assassination in 1977 was a heavy blow; his successors replicated Provisional errors, as when the INLA planted an incendiary bomb at a Dunnes Stores strike over South African goods—an action the chapter condemns for substituting bombs for working-class collective action and lowering consciousness.
The chapter concludes by analysing why Britain remained entrenched. Strategic military value had vanished in the age of intercontinental missiles, and the North was an economic drain. But British imperialism had created “a Frankenstein’s monster” in sectarianism, and withdrawal risked open civil war spreading to Glasgow, Liverpool, and Birmingham. The Provisionals never understood that Britain could not “surrender to terrorism”; they fought for three decades only to accept a compromise available from the start. Meanwhile, London escalated intelligence-gathering, computerising personal data on nationalist residents in 1977 and installing CCTV in Belfast and Derry streets by 1980, exposing the “cruel and repressive face” behind democracy’s mask.